What is the average click-through rate (CTR) for Twitter’s Promoted Tweets advertising platform? Does advertising on Twitter’s Promoted Products ad platform work? And does it drive traffic, leads, sales and other marketing results?

According to a report by eMarketer, Promoted Products’ advertisers are seeing 3-10 percent engagement levels, where ‘engagement’ is typically defined as someone clicking on the link in a Tweet.

Food and beverage companies are failing to optimize their social media marketing efforts, according to a recent study. Over half (54 percent) of food and drink industry professionals admit they don’t measure the return on investment (ROI) on their social media marketing investments.

According to the survey of over 500 food and beverage executives by U.K. based just-food and just-drinks, a further 18 percent ‘did not know’ if their business measured the ROI.

A recent study of 12 million employees at U.S. companies reveals the most social media-savvy companies, industries, jobs and cities in terms of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn usage.

According to the 2011 study by NetProspex (http://www.netprospex.com/np/social), the most social company is The New York Times, followed by Intuit and Juniper Networks.

Website and domain name auction site, Flippa, has released its inaugural State of the Website Economy report, focusing on domain names.

Among the interesting findings of Flippa’s State of the Website Economy July 2011 are that websites and domain names with .com domain extensions have a 124 percent greater chance of selling on Flippa than .co domains, and that dashes in a domain name reduce the average sales price by 26 percent.

Domain name and Internet services provider Tucows Inc. has acquired German domain name registrar EPAG Domainservices GmbH for approximately US$2.5 million (€1.75 million) in cash. Tucows will pay €1.5 million to purchase the shares of EPAG from QSC AG and €0.25 million to settle a working capital adjustment.

EPAG, based in Bonn, Germany, is an ICANN-accredited registrar which manages more than 400,000 domains and over 200 Top Level Domains (TLDs). Tucows intends to continue serving EPAG’s customers and resellers, as well as integrate EPAG’s domain services into its own OpenSRS wholesale domain registration service.

The most popular shopping category among daily deal shoppers is food and dining. A recent survey by PriceGrabber finds that U.S. online consumers most frequently search for food and dining daily deals, followed by shopping deals and then entertainment and events deals.

According to PriceGrabber’s May 2011 survey of 2,088 U.S. Internet users, the top local daily deal search categories are:

U.S. households save around $150 per year in consumer rebates, with the rebate industry ‘saving’ U.S. consumers around $8 billion in 2010.

In its report ‘Shopper Trend Report: Values, Deals & How Far They’re Willing To Go To Get Them’, incentive company Parago also finds, among other things, that:

The Internet video advertising industry – online video advertising networks, media serving platforms, auctions and exchanges – is on track to make $1.4 billion in revenues in 2011.

This is based on CPM (cost per thousand view) fees, transaction fees and other fee-based revenue, indicating an impressive 67.5 percent p.a. growth rate, according to AccuStream Research.

Almost 6 out of 10 U.S. consumers (59 percent) plan to use daily deal websites to buy holiday or special occasion gifts during the 2011 holiday season, according to a recent survey.

The ‘Local Deals Survey’, conducted by PriceGrabber, also reveals that of this 59 percent, 60 percent will use daily deal sites for Christmas or Hanukkah gifts, 56 percent will use them for birthday gifts, and 23 percent will use them to buy anniversary gifts.

176 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in May 2011 for an average of 15.9 hours per viewer, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.

The more than 8 out of 10 U.S. Internet users (83.3 percent) who watched online video, mostly did so on Google Sites (mainly YouTube.com), which attracted 147.2 million unique viewers during the month.